31 May 2006

There's No Point to Our Staying in Iraq

The news coming out of Iraq these days is so unremittingly bad that any observer not conversant with the history of our involvement would have to conclude that the U.S. invaded Iraq with the intention to destroy it using as little manpower as possible, and that this goal has succeeded beyond expectations. For not only have we destroyed it as a functioning nation, we have, by eradicating any extant Iraqi civilian and military authority and institutions, assured that the country would remain destroyed for years to come.

This is no mean feat. By the end of World War II, the allies had effectively destroyed Germany and Japan. Their cities, landscape, and people were but shells of their pre-war state. And, as with Iraq, since all civic institutions were in actuality puppets of the totalitarian state, they too were destroyed. Yet within a few years both countries were humming along quite nicely, and we helped them establish civic institutions that were stronger than any they had previously seen.

Now after three years in Iraq, our efforts to control the country appear to working in reverse, with the frequency of insurgency attacks rising with the length of our stay. In addition to attacks on our troops, invariably resulting in far greater bloodshed among Iraqi civilians, the dozens of bodiesthat regularly turn up at Iraqi morgues bespeak a world of horror beyond the reach of our embedded reporters or even our own troops.

And now we have the inevitable civilian-slaughter incident cropping up where one group of Marines took out their anger/horror/frustrations on some Iraqi's in Haditha last year, while today soldiers shot up a car running a road-block but which actually was frantically transporting a pregnant woman about to give birth. The woman and a companion were killed. Slaughter has become a way of life in Iraq, so it's hard to fault our troops when they're part of it. That's why we shouldn't want them to be a part of it. The administration's reaction to all this is to increase our presence there. In Ramadi, an imminent American offensive may be imminent, as Al Qaeda forces appear to be securing a major foothold in the city.

Signs that Zarqawi-linked groups have taken over the city have been growing. One by one, Sunni sheiks who had vowed to fight radical Islamic insurgents in Al Anbar province have been assassinated...Ramadi residents say they have detected an intensified U.S. effort in recent days to wrest control of the city's streets from insurgents. A Sunni sheik said residents had begun to flee as American forces stepped up bombing raids and ground patrols in the last 10 days.

This all sounds like a replay of Fallouja, where residents fled the city in droves on the eve of an American offensive which succeeded in destroying the city, leaving hundreds of U.S. casualties, killing about 1,000 insurgents - but not damaging the insurgency in any meaningful way. Another such episode seems hardly worth it.

The cause - whatever that cause might be - is surely lost. Should we leave there will be a bloody civil war, but someone will emerge dominant. Who that may be is unimportant, at this point. Should we remain, the insurgency will continue as it is today for as long as we are there. Iran may try to take advantage of our leaving - let them try - they will fail, too. No matter how obligated we may feel to set things right, our efforts only make it worse. As General Odom argues, it's time to cut and run.

We could switch to Ethanol right now if we wanted to anyway. We could be using plug-in-overnight electric cars like GM made for California (and the users absolutely loved) and then DESTROYED at the end of the leases anyway (just with a few nuclear power plants to provide the extra juice). We could drill the enormouos oil deposits off Florida's coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and in Alaska anyway, we could harness ocean waves for energy like New Zeland, put up windmills everywhere like Germany and Denmark, use the new, improved Solar panels (earth recieves more energy from the sun in a day than it uses in a YEAR, we could use the unfathonable geo-thermal possiblities as there unimaginable amounts of energy via steam from the molten lava in the earth's crust.

WE REALLY DONT NEED THEIR DAMNED OIL. Big oil companines, whom through mucho holding companines and individual super-rich shareholders (and families of shareholders) own controlling stock in automobile manufacturers and buy off legislators (the "easiest" whores of them all) to keep us ON oil until its all drilled out of the ground. Its the penultimate monopoly.

You cant tax the sun, wind, hydroelectric, waves, etc. The present system benefits ALL the wrong people. We could put Iran on her KNEES in less than one year by arming the world with new energy technologies that would make oil passe' and uneccessary. Did I even mention hydrogen? Hydrogen liberated from water using nuclear energy? If France gets 78% of her electricity from Nuclear power (and uranium and plutonium are quite plentiful, even here), WHY NOT US.

The thing about the Iraq War that amazes me the most is that despite all the clumsy and unconvincing attempts by the current administration to justify and rationalize the invasion and occupation, the real reason for it has been obvious from the start, yet hardly any commentators -outside of a fearless few like Buchanan -have dared try to offer an explanation.

You might recall that immediately after U.S. forces overran Iraq and U.S. diplomat Paul Bremer was installed as head of the Provisional Governing Authority, right after the Iraqi army was formally disbanded and before any effort to restore order to the capital was made, Bremer issued his 100 Orders for the new Iraq. These orders were primarily of an economic policy making nature. They included an order that Iraq immediately revert back to selling their oil in U.S. dollars (Saddam had been selling Iraqi oil in Euros for 3 years), and an order that Iraq sell off all its state owned enterprises while allowing unrestricted foreign investment (read: U.S. corporate investment) in the Iraqi economy.

It hasn't been widely reported but Iraq's "freely elected" government since then has written those very same 100 orders into the new Iraqi constitution, per U.S. government demands.

In other words, the whole reason for the U.S. invasion was to force the Iraqi nation to submit to the New World Order of Corporate Globalization. This is why both political parties supported the invasion, as the DNC and the RNC are dominated by globalist ideologues. They both zealously advocate the creation of a corporate controlled, one-world economy, and support the use of force, against anti-globalization holdouts like Iraq, to achieve it.

This is also why both the democrats and republicans support open U.S. borders and national sovereignty-undermining globalist institutions like the World Trade Organization, even though most Americans are clearly opposed to both.

So you see, the same globalist ideologues who have given us uncontrolled immigration (due to open borders for the facilitation of corporate commerce), and our international trade disaster (which is what is about to cause our currency to collapse, our living standards to plummet, and which is a direct result of over a decade of foolish "Free Trade" policies designed for the benefit of multinational corporations), gave us the Iraq War.

"Their cities, landscape, and people were but shells of their pre-war state. And, as with Iraq, since all civic institutions were in actuality puppets of the totalitarian state, they too were destroyed. Yet within a few years both countries were humming along quite nicely, and we helped them establish civic institutions that were stronger than any they had previously seen."

Another difference, though, is that most of the allies-- including Britain, France and the Soviet Union but not the US-- were basically dealing with destroyed infrastructure themselves, so it wasn't as though people in the ruined countries really had anywhere else to go. Moreover, the vast majority of the human capital in Japan and Germany was retained, surviving the war intact. The engineers, industrialists and scientists largely survived in what were already modern countries, still largely homogeneous ethnically, which is why Japan and Germany were both paradoxically able to become the world's two biggest economies behind the United States itself.

The US itself, of course, was itself at the time, in large part, an ethnically German nation-- one of my uncles who fought in WWII was fond of saying that the Germans in the US were in effect coming to the aid of their German cousins in Germany by liberating them from a dictator and then helping them to flourish afterward. As for Japan, they did not have such an ethnic connection with the US, but they did have a strong industrial base and established capital networks that helped them as well.

The US has ruined Iraq in large part because Bush and the neoconservatives failed to remove their heads from their asses long enough to realize that Iraq was a far different animal from Japan and Germany, and that it certainly had potential for growth but rested on a much more fragile and tribal foundation. Moreover, Iraq itself was stitched together by the British after WWI as a way to sow ethnic conflict and help the British to get the oil. This failed of course, as the British were themselves humiliated and kicked out of Iraq by 1930, but the mess that was Iraq remained, and Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the neocons, not to mention the hawkish Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman, have all gotten into this irresolvable mess.

"There was no civil war and Iraq functioned under Saddam.

This will effectively make Iran the largest supplier of oil in the world. ... Our grandchildren will be serving in Iraq because no one will or probably should withdraw."

Yep, this is yet another reason that I've decided to emigrate from the US in 2012, on top of many other things that I can't stand-- like mass immigration and this obsession with diversity and political correctness, held by both parties. I just can't take it anymore, I don't want to raise my children here, and I sure don't want to continue paying taxes to this regime, which is basically the same whatever the party in power. I don't want my kids to be used as cannon fodder in some war for the imperial elites here.

Most EU countries have not only avoided this stupid war in Iraq, they've also recently introduced tough policies to block out the Third World invasions of their countries and preserve the cultures-- even as the US, Canada and Australia all insist on continuing to maximize the Third World onslaught even as their own European-descended populations dwindle from low birth rates.

It's effectively a government-sponsored massive ethnic cleansing of the founding population in favor of more pliable Third-World transplants for the corporations. In other words, the US, Canada and Australia are little more than imperialist systems designed to maximize the wealth of their elites while rapidly crushing their Caucasian middle and professional classes. These resource wars, like Iraq, are just one other aspect to it.

My original plan has been to move to the Tyrol region around the Alps, either in southern Austria or northern Italy, and I've already gotten the German- and Italian-language software to it. But recently, France of all places has caught my eye, since they've finally managed to crack down on their unruly North African population and introduce one of the toughest immigration restriction policies in Europe. I took French in school and still use it, could easily re-learn and improve on it, and so I may well wind up moving to France in 2012. We'll see.